1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005,
4 2006, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5 See the end for copying conditions.
7 Please send GNU Wget bug reports to <bug-wget@gnu.org>.
9 * Changes in Wget (MAINLINE).
11 ** Added support for CSS. This includes:
12 - Parsing links from CSS files, and from CSS content found in HTML
13 style tags and attributes.
14 - Supporting conversion of links found within CSS content, when
15 --convert-links is specified.
16 - Ensuring that CSS files end in the ".css" filename extension,
17 when --convert-links is specified.
19 CSS support in Wget is thanks to Ted Mielczarek
20 <ted.mielczarek@gmail.com>.
23 * Changes in Wget 1.11.1.
25 ** Interrupted downloads no longer result in renaming the file
26 (regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2).
28 ** Progress bar now displays correctly in non-English locales (and a
29 related assertion failure was fixed).
31 ** Wget no longer issues a GET request over HTTP for files it should
32 know it's not going to download (regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2).
34 ** Added option --auth-no-challenge, to support broken pre-1.11
35 authentication-before-server-challenge, which turns out to still be
36 useful for some limited cases.
38 ** Documentation of accept/reject lists in the manual's "Types of
39 Files" section now explains various aspects of their behavior that may
40 be surprising, and notes that they may change in the future.
42 ** Documentation of --no-parents now explains how a trailing slash, or
43 lack thereof, in the specified URL, will affect behavior.
45 * Changes in Wget 1.11.
47 ** Timestamping now uses the value from the most recent HTTP response,
48 rather than the first one it got.
50 ** Authentication information is no longer sent as part of the Referer
51 header in recursive fetches.
53 ** No authentication credentials are sent until a challenge is issued,
54 for improved security. Authentication handling is still not
55 RFC-compliant, as once a Basic challenge has been received, it will
56 assume it can send credentials to any URL at that same host, and not
57 just the ones at or below the original authenticated location.
58 Credentials for Digest authentication are still never saved or issued
59 automatically, and continue to require a challenge for each resource.
61 ** Added --max-redirect option, allowing the user to specify what should
62 be the maximum number of HTTP redirects to follow.
64 ** Wget now supports saving HTTP downloads using file names specified by
65 the `Content-Disposition' header. This is a standard way of specifying
66 the file name used by many web dynamically generated pages. However, the
67 current implementation is inefficient, and known to have bugs. It is
68 EXPERIMENTAL only, and not enabled by default. Use --content-disposition
71 ** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
72 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
73 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
75 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
76 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
77 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
79 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
80 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
81 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
82 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
83 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
85 ** The source code has been migrated to Mercurial. The repositories are
86 available at http://hg.addictivecode.org/. Prior to this, the source
87 code was hosted on Subversion (migrated from the original CVS); you can
88 still get access to older tags and branches for Wget in the Subversion
89 repository at http://addictivecode.org/svn/wget/.
91 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
93 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
94 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
95 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
97 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
98 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
99 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
100 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
103 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
104 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
105 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
106 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
108 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
109 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
110 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
111 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
112 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
113 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
114 when downloading to stdout.
118 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
119 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
120 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
121 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
122 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
123 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
124 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
125 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
127 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
128 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
130 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
131 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
132 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
133 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
134 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
135 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
136 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
138 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
139 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
140 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
143 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
144 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
145 are no longer supported.
147 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
148 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
149 revert to the old behavior.
151 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
152 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
153 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
154 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
155 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
157 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
158 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
159 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
161 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
162 not arrive from the network.
164 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
165 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
166 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
167 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
168 be used to revert to the old behavior.
170 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
171 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
173 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
174 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
175 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
176 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
177 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
180 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
181 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
182 specified via `.wgetrc'.
184 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
185 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
186 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
187 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
188 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
191 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
192 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
193 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
194 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
195 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
196 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
197 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
198 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
200 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
202 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
204 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
206 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
207 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
208 send a POST request with the specified contents.
210 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
212 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
213 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
214 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
215 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
218 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
219 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
220 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
222 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
223 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
224 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
226 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
227 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
228 considered a fatal error.
230 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
233 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
234 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
235 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
236 characters such as space. You can use the new option
237 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
238 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
239 non-native partitions.
241 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
242 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
243 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
244 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
246 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
247 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
249 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
250 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
252 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
253 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
254 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
256 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
258 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
260 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
262 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
263 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
264 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
265 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
266 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
268 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
269 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
270 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
273 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
275 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
276 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
277 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
280 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
281 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
282 have been downloaded.
284 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
285 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
286 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
288 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
289 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
290 are now converted correctly.
292 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
293 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
296 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
297 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
298 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
300 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
301 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
304 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
305 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
307 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
310 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
311 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
313 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
314 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
315 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
316 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
318 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
320 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
322 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
324 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
325 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
328 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
329 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
330 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
332 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
333 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
334 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
335 stressing for the server and the network.
337 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
340 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
341 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
343 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
344 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
347 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
348 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
349 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
350 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
353 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
355 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
356 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
357 large sites (thousands of documents).
359 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
360 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
361 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
362 distribution installed on your system.
364 * Changes in Wget 1.6
366 ** Administrative changes.
368 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
369 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
370 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
371 are being helped by many other people.
373 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
376 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
378 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
379 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
380 the web page for downloading instructions.
382 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
383 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
384 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
386 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
387 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
388 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
389 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
391 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
392 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
393 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
394 default in the system wgetrc.
396 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
397 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
398 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
400 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
401 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
402 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
404 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
405 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
406 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
408 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
410 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
411 bound to multiple IP addresses.
413 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
415 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
417 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
419 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
421 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
423 ** Wget speaks many languages!
425 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
426 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
427 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
429 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
431 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
433 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
435 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
437 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
438 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
440 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
443 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
444 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
446 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
449 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
450 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
453 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
455 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
456 standards set by other GNU utilities.
458 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
459 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
461 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
464 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
465 distributed with Wget.
467 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
469 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
471 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
473 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
475 ** Can do passive FTP.
479 ** Info documentation expanded.
481 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
483 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
487 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
489 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
490 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
492 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
494 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
496 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
499 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
501 ** --convert-links should work now.
505 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
509 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
511 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
513 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
515 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
516 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
517 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
518 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
519 most importantly, use.
521 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
522 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
524 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
525 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
526 wget http://user:password@hostname/
528 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
529 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
530 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
532 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
533 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
535 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
536 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
538 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
540 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
541 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
543 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
546 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
547 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
550 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
551 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
552 sysadmin to like you).
554 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
556 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
559 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
560 through a proxy server.
562 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
563 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
565 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
568 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
569 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
571 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
573 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
575 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
577 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
578 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
580 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
581 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
583 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
585 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
586 turn on mirroring options).
588 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
590 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
592 ** A host of bugfixes.
594 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
596 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
598 ** Added support for no_proxy
600 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
602 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
604 ** More natural command-line options
606 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
608 ** Added support for robots.txt
610 ** Fixed some minor bugs
612 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
614 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
616 ** REST supported in FTP
618 ** Proxy servers supported
620 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
621 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
622 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
624 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
626 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
628 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
630 ** autoconf supported
632 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
633 Copyright information:
635 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
637 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
638 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
639 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
640 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
642 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
643 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
644 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last